One of the big highlights from Wonder Woman is the No Man’s Land sequence, where – surrounded by the horror and suffering of The Great War – Gal Gadot’s Diana decides to make a stand, fearlessly stepping out of the trenches into a hail of German machine gun fire as she makes her grand entrance as Wonder Woman. It’s certainly a memorable and inspirational scene, and according to director Patty Jenkins, it’s one that she had to fight to include in the movie.
“It’s my favorite scene in the movie and it’s the most important scene in the movie,” said Jenkins in an interview with Fandango. “It’s also the scene that made the least sense to other people going in, which is why it’s a wonderful victory for me. I think that in superhero movies, they fight other people, they fight villains. So when I started to really hunker in on the significance of No Man’s Land, there were a couple [of] people who were deeply confused, wondering, ‘Well, what is she going to do? How many bullets can she fight?’ And I kept saying, ‘It’s not about that. This is a different scene than that. This is a scene about her becoming Wonder Woman.’”
“You have wonderful storyboard artists and a great second unit director and different people that you collaborate with, but in this case I just said, ‘I’m going to treat this like I would a very simple drama and let me paint you a picture of what it is that I’m trying to do before we move on to working on it in this other way,’” she continued. “It’s about her. We’re not angry at the Germans. We don’t care about the Germans and neither does she. This is what she needs to do to get across [No Man’s Land], and so it’s about her. I take deep gratification that, ultimately, all of us together were able to turn it into that scene. It was always the most important scene in the movie to me in that it is the birth of Wonder Woman.”
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Before she was Wonder Woman, she was Diana, princess of the Amazons, trained to be an unconquerable warrior. Raised on a sheltered island paradise, when an American pilot crashes on their shores and tells of a massive conflict raging in the outside world, Diana leaves her home, convinced she can stop the threat. Fighting alongside man in a war to end all wars, Diana will discover her full powers…and her true destiny.
Wonder Woman sees Patty Jenkins (Monster) directing a cast that includes Gal Gadot (Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice), Chris Pine (Star Trek), Connie Nielsen (Gladiator), Robin Wright (House of Cards), Danny Huston (X-Men Origins: Wolverine), David Thewlis (The Theory of Everything), Ewen Bremner (Snowpiercer), Said Taghmaoui (American Hustle), Elena Anaya (The Skin I Live In), Lisa Loven Kongsli (Force Majeure), Lucy Davis (Shaun of the Dead) and Ann Wolf.
Originally published June 3, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
